NIH Center for Human Immunology, Inflammation, and Autoimmunity (CHI)

The NIH Center for Human Immunology, Inflammation, and Autoimmunity (CHI) is a trans-NIH resource whose mission is to provide a collaborative hub of advanced translational immunology for NIH clinical and pre-clinical studies. This uniquely structured program provides centralized and efficient management of projects in full collaboration with NIH investigators to better understand human immune function and pathophysiology. Our team works closely to plan and optimize experimental workflows tailored to each investigator’s specific research goals; execute highly sophisticated technological procedures on precious human samples; troubleshoot and optimize assays to generate high-quality data; seamlessly transfer data to our in-house informaticians who perform multimodal computational analyses; and provide expert scientific consultation, interpretations, and recommendations throughout the project lifecycle – all in one place.

Established Technologies

Single Cell and Bulk Genomics

• CITE-seq on blood and tissue samples to characterize transcriptomic profiles and expression of more than 100 cell surface proteins simultaneously.
• ATAC-seq (often alongside CITE-seq within a single experiment) to assess chromatin accessibility and transcriptome profiling.
• Single-cell RNA-seq for transcriptomic profiling in cellularly diverse samples.
• Immuno-profiling by TCR and/or BCR sequencing.

High Parameter Cytometry and Cell Sorting

• Up to 40-color spectral flow cytometry for precision immunophenotyping of PBMC, T-cell subsets, and specific tissues.
• Mass cytometry using Helios CyTOF instrumentation and stimulation assays to simultaneously assess 8 phospho-pathways in 20 cell populations.
• Flow sorting to enrich rare and antigen-specific populations for single-cell sequencing.

Proteomics

• The aptamer-based SomaLogic SomaScan® assay to profile expression of 11,000 proteins from small volume samples of plasma, serum, CSF, urine, and more.

Bioinformatics

• NGS, Flow, and SomaScan Data QC and analysis.
• Transcriptomics data analysis for single-cell RNA-seq, CITE-seq, and Bulk RNA-seq.
• Epigenetics data analysis for ChIP-seq and ATAC-seq.
• Genomics data analysis for whole genome and exome variant calling.
• Functional analysis for GO enrichment, Gene set enrichment, Pathway analysis, DNA motifs, and integration.
• Computational pipelines for large-scale analysis and distribution, and Shiny apps.
• Multi-omics analysis and data integration.